This is part of our monthly series 'Mission: Accepted,' in partnership with Minds Matter, which chronicles the lives of four students as they apply for college in their senior year.
College decisions are rolling in, but part-time job offers are nonexistent. I have gotten into a multitude of schools from the best liberal arts schools in the country, to the best UC schools, to elite schools and even a few Ivy League schools! As I pass the halfway-mark of my last semester of high school, I am ecstatic for college, yet slightly sad that I have applied to over 30 jobs and not one employer caught the bait.
Now that I am done with college applications and preparing for AP exams, I am looking for something on the side to spend my spare time with but it is so hard for teenagers to get part-time jobs. I can get admitted to some of the best schools in the country but cannot even get a single job. On each interview, I went in bright-eyed, ready to show my personality and dedication to hard work -- but I was always held back by something.
Competing with much older, experienced candidates who have fewer schedule pressures than a high school student made it hard to show why a company should hire me instead. I have gotten so frustrated after interviews upon interviews. Lack of job experience has made me a small fish in a big pond; however, I believe it is the recessive state of our economy contributing to this competitive nature of job hunting. According to reports from CNN: "Just 26 percent of teens ages 16 to 19 had a job in 2011, down from 45 percent in 2000." Although frustrated, I am hopeful for what college will bring.
In college, I hope to hit the ground running; build up my resume as much as possible by continuing my volunteer efforts, working (hopefully it will be easier to get a job), and networking as much as possible to find opportunities related to my course of study.
Nevertheless, I am ecstatic to share that I have secured the summer research internship of my dreams; I will be in Maine at one of the foremost neuroscience research laboratories in the country. I am very excited to be partaking in neuroscience research and analyzing how certain molecular aspects in the brain contribute to nervous system diseases. I will be developing my own independent project under the guidance of my research mentor and presenting my findings to other researchers over the course of 10 weeks. Researchers in this laboratory concentrate on learning more about various parts of the brain and the genetic basis for Alzheimer's disease and other neuroscience disorders. My summer before college sure looks as though it is going to be an enlightening and fun one in the picturesque pine tree state of Maine.